| Response Email to Prof. Michael Jarrett requesting for underlying data used |
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| Friday, 05 February 2010 00:00 | |||
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Professor Michael Jerret emailed us back on February 5, 2010. His reasons expends a substantial amount of words attempting to explain the confidential nature of his past research data and apparently pegs this reason for not being able to share it with other interested parties. We would hope minimally that Jerrett is familiar, as are all creditable researchers, with the “anonymizing” of confidential data handling and the standards defined be organizations like the National Center for Health Statistics, the National Institute of Health and Data Sharing, the National Academy of Science and numerous court decisions.
Dear Mr. Brown: I apologize for this delayed reply, but I had to coordinate with President Yudof and his staff. I understand that President Yudof has now replied, and I would like to elaborate on where we are with the research you are interested in having published. My colleagues and I are continuing to work on the Air Resources Board contract to establish definitive estimates of the mortality risks associated with particulate matter and other criteria air pollutants in California. Last year, however, the State of California suspended hundreds of contracts due to budgetary problems. Our contract was suspended for some 4 months and as a result key personnel could not be hired or had to be laid off the project, which has put us behind schedule. After this considerable delay and disruption it took some time to get the project back on track. We have now just developed the personal exposure measures at the home addresses of the subjects in our study and are now just starting the "formal" analyses of them, which will take another 6-12 months to complete. As I explained in my earlier communications, I was out of the country when you invited me to speak on August 1, 2009. As the results become available and are properly vetted through rigorous peer review, I would be happy to speak to you and others about our findings. I should also point out that none of the subject-specific health data needed to conduct the health analyses is resident on the University of California campus. These data are housed and analyzed at the University of Ottawa, Canada. In any event, the data contain sensitive health information on hundreds of thousands of people, and there are means within the data to identify some individuals. On entering the American Cancer Society Cancer Prevention II study, all individuals signed informed consent forms and were guaranteed that their identities would remain confidential. Thus any request to access the data would have to through ethics review to protect the subjects’ identities and ensure these identities would remain confidential. There are also provisions from all involved institutions regarding the protection of human subjects, to which any of the researchers accessing the data would have to adhere. The data I use for the study component here at UC Berkeley is publicly available air pollution monitoring data that is down loadable through the ARB website. We will endeavor to supply the results as quickly as possible, but we cannot rush these analyses. They are technically intricate, extremely complex, and we need to take appropriate care to ensure the results are valid. Your recommendation to replicate the national analysis here in California is not feasible or scientifically defensible because there are so few metropolitan areas with central monitors from our other national studies that the exposure assignment would be so crude that we could not trust the results. Results produced from such analyses would likely not be publishable in the scientific literature and even if they were published, they would have little or no credibility in the scientific community given the limitations of the exposure assessment. One of the reasons our research is so widely cited relates to the great care we take in applying the most sophisticated and scientifically valid methods to understand this complex relationship between air pollution and mortality. We cannot rush such analyses without jeopardizing our extensive quality control and peer review process, which is essential for ensuring the scientific findings are valid and accepted by scientific and policy communities. We will not rush these analyses for any given external concern because the integrity and quality of the findings is of utmost importance to my colleagues and I, who are conducting the research and are ultimately responsible for the scientific results that we publish. I understand how your organization and many others would like to see our results published. It is unfortunate that the budgetary problem in California has led to delays in finalizing science that may help to inform decisions affecting your industry and more generally public health. But these matters were beyond my control or the control of anyone at the University of California. We are working hard to supply those results through publication in journals of the highest standing in the fields of Medicine and Environmental Health. Thank you for your interest in our research. With best regards, Michael Jerrett Director, Doctor of Public Health Program University of California, Berkeley Division of Environmental Health Sciences This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Tel: 510-642-3960
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